
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 




ORATION 



DELIVERED BY 



HON. JOHN lAIDOLPHTIim,lL.D, 



OF VIRGITVIA, 



APRIL 7, 1888, 



CELEBRATION OF THE CENTENNIAL 



FOUNDING OF THE NORTHWEST 

I' 



MARIETTA, OHIO. 




COLUMBUS, O. ; 
OHIO ARCH.KOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL SO' .;:rY. 

1888. 

Press of Hann & Aoair. 






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ORATION OF HON. JOHN RANDOLPH 
TUCKER, LL. D. 

The last decades of our century bristle with centennial 
anniversaries ; the landmarks of human progress in the 
free institutions of a Christian civilization. 

The Old World, with its crowded populations, with its 
social orders and castes, and its despotic forms of govern- 
ment was stagnant and unhealthful. Commerce reached 
forth its bold and eager arms for new fields for human 
enterprise and a larger and freer civilization. 

Motives of gain mingled with religious 'fervor to plant 
the standard of European polity and the emblem of the 
cross on the soil of a new world. 

We are near the anniversary of that great 1492, which 
turned the world upside down and doubled the domain of 
civilized life among men. Columbia opened her doors to 
European emigration. The glitter of the precious metals 
first fascinated the vulgar ; but now millions of men with 
teeming golden harvests, and with fields white with their 
myriad bales of cotton, and with minerals and forests for 
light, heat and all the arts of life, feed a hungry, clothe a 
naked, and house a homeless world. 

Three centuries ago the Spanish Armada sank under 
the storm of God into the British waters in sight of the 
reefs of Albion ; and left England mistress of the seas. 

In 1584, Edmund Spenser dedicated the " Faerie Queen " 
to " Elizabeth, by the grace of God Queen of England, 
France, and Ireland and Virginia; " and in the same year 
the Virgin Queen gave to Sir Walter Raleigh the charter 
to take and possess Virginia in her royal name. Virginia 
was rocked in her infant cradle to the sweet song of the 
master of English poetry. 

But it was reserved for another reign to plant an English 
colony securely on American soil. During the memorable 
seventeenth century, when the conflict of prerogative and 



— 2 — 

liberty convulsed our mother country, in the month of 
May, 1607, when our tide-water region is fragrant with 
flowers and is clad in all the beauties of the opening 
spring, a few vessels came to anchor in Powhatan River, 
and a few hundred English colonists planted the first 
seeds of British civilization at Jamestown. Here on 
the banks of our Nile rested the ark of American insti- 
tutions. 

A few years later, in December, 1620, the pilgrim 
fathers landed at Plymouth Rock, and raised the standard 
of civil polity based on popular compact. 

These Colonists brought with them the spirit of British 
freedom, exalted in its courage by the bold temper which 
inspires and is enhanced by adventurous enterprise. 

A new continent, without fixed institutions, without 
king, nobility, or ecclesiastical authority, was opened to 
the fresh impress of the sons of civilized life, who landed 
upon its shores. All the bands of the old and established 
society of the mother country were loosened, and the 
colonial mind, free from the environment of ancient prej- 
udices, was prepared for an order of things more natural, 
and, therefore, more true. The scion of the ancient tree 
of liberty could better grow unchoked by the weeds of 
privilege and prerogative in the soil, and drinking in the 
balmy air of this virgin continent. 

As Lord Bacon has it, " No tree is so good first set as 
by transplanting." Young and bold men — men tired of 
old habits, customs, and thoughts, yearning to throw off 
the restraints of an ancient and effete social order (as a 
religious reformation had shaken the foundations of the 
ancient Church), and to find full scope for the enterprises 
of life, and to impress themselves upon a new and un- 
formed empire — these were the colonists that braved the 
rock-bound coasts of New England, and plunged into 
the untrodden wilderness of tide-water Virginia. They 
panted to be free, and could not be enslaved. They brought 
with them also a clear comprehension and vigorous grasp 



— 3— 

of all the fundamental principles of liberty imbedded in 
Magna Charta. 

These were asserted with emphatic distinctness in 
their public acts. As early as 1623, ^^^^ House of Bur- 
gesses of Virginia enacted that no tax could be laid on 
any colonist but by the vote of the General Assembly. 
In 1636, the year of John Hampden and Ship-money, the 
Massachusetts colony made a similar declaration ; and 
other colonies followed. 

In 165 1, when the fleet of the English Parliament in- 
vaded the waters of the Chesapeake, a treaty was made 
between the Commonwealth of England and the colony 
of Virginia, which is one of the most striking of the his- 
toric memorials of the colonial period. 

It provides for the obedience of the colony to the Com- 
monwealth of England, but that " this submission and 
subscription be acknowledged as a voluntary act, not 
forced nor constrained by a conquest upon the country." 

It declares that Virginia shall be free from all taxes, 
customs, and impositions whatsoever, and none to be im- 
posed on them without consent of the Grand Assembly, 
and so that neither forts nor castles be erected or garrisons 
maintained without their consent." Thus by treaty stipu- 
lations in 165 1, Virginia established the great principle 
on which the American Revolution was based — that taxa- 
tion by any other than the representatives of the tax- 
paying people was unlawful and contrary to liberty. 

I present this action of Virginia and Massachusetts es- 
pecially to you, because the men who settled here a cen- 
tury ago were the sons of New England, and planted their 
feet upon the soil which Virginia gave to the Union. The 
principles of freedom I have stated were the inheritance 
of Putnam and his followers, and were the fixed law of 
the land of Virginia on which they made their homes. 
When, therefore, in May, 1764, Samuel Adams and his co- 
patriots, and in May, 1765, Patrick Henry and his associates 
had denounced taxation without representation as tyranny 



— 4— 

and against law, they but reasserted a principle as old as 
Magna Cliarta and the precious corner-stone of every 
colonial government. It was the canon of the settlement 
of 1688, two centuries ago in England, as a result of the 
struggle between the people and the House of Stuart, 
culminating in the constitutional monarchy under William 
and Mary. 

Mark the epochs of the centuries : America discovered 
in 1492 ; Virginia's birth-song written by Spenser in 1584, 
the prelude to English colonization in America ; the Eng- 
lish Constitution established in 1688; our own in 1788; 
and we to-day celebrate them all on the natal day of the 
inheritance of the Northwest, under the donation of the 
Old Dominion, by the Pilgrim pioneers from New Eng- 
land. The pendulum of history swings in centuries — in 
the slow but sure progress of the human race to a higher 
and nobler civilization. 

When the British Government asserted, in the Grenville 
act, the power to tax the colonies, it made a fatal issue 
with them upon a principle which was too sacred and fun- 
damental to be surrendered ; and a conflict of arms was in- 
evitable. When power invades liberty, resistance to the 
wrong is a duty to God, and the forces of government 
must be challenged by the people with all the armed force 
they can command. The special matter of taxation was 
the occasion of revolution, but the time had come when 
taxation by a foreign power was regarded only as a symp- 
tom of a more general and chronic disease — namely, the 
subjection of the welfare of any people to the will and 
control of another nation. 

Self-government — independence of alien control in all 
things — was the need of the American colonies, which 
was illustrated in the matter of taxation, but which was 
equally important in all their relations, domestic and 
foreign. 

No people can be governed by another, alien in sym- 
pathy and with no community of interest, without misgov- 



— 5— 

ernment and tyranny. Hence the view of the statesmen 
of the period broadened into a deep conviction, that longer 
dependence on the British crown was virtual servitude, 
and that independence was essential to liberty, develop- 
ment and progress. 

The Continental Congress of thirteen colonies met Sep- 
tember 5, 1774. Two years of futile efforts to patch up 
the breach which tyranny had made in public confidence 
and in popular affection passed away, and the declaration of 
complete and final separation was unitedly made on the 
famous 4th of July, 1776. The loose and inorganic league 
betw^een the colonies represented by Congress, whose pow- 
ers were held under a tenancy at the will of each colony, 
made its efforts to conduct the war pitiably inefficient — 
and they would have resulted in failure but for the impulses 
of popular patriotism ; the masterful genius of a majes- 
tic leader — that hero of equal mind in the shock of defeat 
as amid the shouts of victory, — and the generous co-oper- 
ation of a great and noble ally. Congress proposed in 1777 
to the colonies a plan of organic union under the articles 
of confederation, which, however, were never adopted by 
all the States until March i, 1781, and by their express 
terms were wholly inoperative until all had consented to 
them. 

A brief view of the colonial condition is now necessary, 
as well to appreciate the obstacles to this organic union 
as to show the relation of all these historic references to 
the event we celebrate to-day. 

Prior to the seven years' war between Great Britain and 
France, which ended in 1763, the three powers of Great 
Britain, France and Spain held possession of all the terri- 
tory now included in the United States and Canada. 

France owned Canada and Louisiana, which covered a 
claim to the region west of the Mississippi to the Pacific. 
Spain owned Florida ; and Great Britain held the whole 
region to the Mississippi, and with a claim beyond to the 
Pacific, which conflicted with that of France. 



— 6— 

By the treaty of Paris, in 1763, between Great Britain, 
France, and Spain, France ceded Canada, and Spain ceded 
Florida to Great Britain ; and the boundary fixed between 
Great Britain and France was the Mississippi River, ad 
Jihim aqiioe^ from its source to the Iberville, thence through 
that river and the lakes of Maurepas and Pontchartrain to 
the sea. 

The effect of this treaty upon colonial rights, especially 
in Virginia, can now be readily understood. 

By the charters to Virginia of 1606, 1609 and 161 1, she 
claimed from Point Comfort two hundred miles north, 
which would bring it to about the fortieth parallel, and 
the same distance south upon the Atlantic coast, and 
backward, west and northwest to the sea — that is, the 
Pacific. 

By the treaty of 1651 between the Commonwealth of 
England and Virginia, already referred to, it is provided 
" that Virginia shall have and enjoy the ancient bounds 
and limits granted by the charters of the former King." 
The terms "West and Northwest" were always held to 
include beyond the fortieth parallel, and to embrace Mich- 
igan, Wisconsin, and all the portions of Ohio, Indiana and 
Illinois north of that parallel. 

These bounds and limits, fixed by the three charters 
and confirmed by the treaty with the Commonwealth of 
England, made Virginia, in the extent of her domain, an 
empire in herself. But the treaty of Paris (1763) made 
her western boundary the middle of the Mississippi down 
to 36° 30', her southern parallel, after the grant to the 
Carolinas had been made, which she recognized and ceded 
by her constitution of June 29, 1776. 

When by that constitution, on the 29th of June, 1776, 
Virginia assumed to be a free and independent State, she 
rightfully asserted her jurisdictional claim to the bound- 
aries fixed by the charters and modified by the treaty of 
Paris of 1763. 

This splendid domain, which embraces what are now 



eight States of the Union, containing 350,000 square miles, 
with a present population of 15,000,000, was the rightful 
empire of Virginia with which she entered the league of 
1774 and the confederation of 1781. 

I am aware that questions were made as to the title of 
Virginia to this domain ; but they originated in a natural 
jealousy of her stake in the success of the revolution and 
of her preponderant power in the counsels of the Union, 
had she retained it. 

But all question of her title was at rest when, with just 
and magnanimous hand, she gave to all an equal share 
with herself in this inheritance which was all her own. 
Jealousy was suppressed and the cavils of her rivals 
were silenced when, with a self-abnegation as rare as it 
was noble, she surrendered all to the Union and afterwards 
sealed the Ordinance of 1787, which excluded her own 
people with their slaves from the territory she gave for 
the benefit of others. 

Much was said at one time as to the title claimed by 
some parties and companies and even States under pur- 
chase from the Indians. That pretension never availed at 
any time, but met with signal condemnation in the mas- 
terly and unanimous judgment of the Supreme Court in 
Johnson vs. Mcintosh, (8th Wheaton, 543,) where it is 
established as a part of the American polity, that the 
European race by discovery and conquest hold the pre- 
eminent right of pre-emption of the Indian title, which 
excludes the right of any one, without the consent of the 
sovereign power, to gain any title from the Indians as 
against the sovereign of the territory. 

But the title of Virginia stands on a higher ground than 
her chartered grant. Her statesmanship conceived what 
her military genius achieved, the conquest of the territory 
for herself in order that with free hand and heart she 
might give it to the Union. 

Some time after the treaty of Paris (1763), France ceded 
Louisiana to Spain, and thus placed Spain in the posses- 



sioii of the mouths of the Mississippi River, and of the 
west bank of that river to the middle thereof in its whole 
length, with a claim by Spain (never sound under inter- 
national law) thereby to shut this outlet to the Gulf 
against all the people inhabiting the country on its east 
bank, and on its northern tributaries, the Ohio River and 
others. 

The obstruction of the Allegheny mountains to com- 
merce between the Western territory and the Atlantic 
seaboard, with only the natural outlet of the Mississippi 
for the products of the Western settlements, made this 
claim of occlusion of the Mississippi by a European 
power one of the gravest questions for American states- 
manship at that period ; and Virginia, with her claim to 
the Mississippi River, including Kentucky south of the 
Ohio River and this Northwestern Territory north of that 
river, saw very clearly its importance, and therefore urged 
with persistent vigor the recognition of the free naviga- 
tion of the Mississippi to the public seas. One other 
view of the situation is most important. If the United 
States could not secure to the Western people a free Mis- 
sissippi navigation, the temptation of private interest 
might seduce the people of the West to abandon their 
Eastern allies, and seek the protection of that European 
power which could open the Mississippi to their com- 
merce — a suggestion which threatened the Union itself. 
Spain had, early in the Revolution, declined to join 
France in aiding the American colonies, and urged, as 
a precondition to joining any alliance with the United 
States, that the latter should renounce the free navigation 
of the Mississippi, and limit their western boundary 
to the Allegheny mountains. Virginia instructed her 
delegates in Congress, in November, 1779, to obtain in 
the then pending negotiations with Spain the free nav- 
igation of the Mississippi to the seas, with easements 
on the shore and at the mouth for the Western com- 
merce. This condition of affairs will explain the pre- 



— 9— 

vious sagacious action of Virginia, to which I will now 
call attention. 

George Rogers Clarke was born near Monticello, Albe- 
marle county, Va., in 1752. With slight education (as 
appears from his letters), he became a practical surveyor, 
and after campaigning a short time against the Indians in 
Virginia, he went to Kentucky in 1775, from which he, as 
its delegate, came to the convention of Virginia, at Wil- 
liamsburg, in 1776, and urged upon the authorities the 
creation of the new county of Kentucky and a supply of 
ammunition for its defense. "A country not worth de- 
fending is not worth claiming," was his laconic appeal. 

Patrick Henry, the first Governor of Virginia, as sagac- 
ious and prophetic as a statesman as he was a master of 
eloquence, seconded his plans ; and Clarke started back 
with five hundred pounds of powder, which he carried by 
land to the Monongahela, and thence to a point near 
Maysville, Ky. He repelled the Indians from that vicin- 
ity, and sent spies into Illinois, and on their return early 
in 1777 hastened back to Virginia to lay his plans before 
the authorities for the conquest of Illinois. 

An act was passed authorizing the Governor and Coun- 
cil to organize an expedition "to march and attack any of 
our Western enemies." (9 Henn. Stat., 375.) 

Governor Henry placed a band of a few hundred men 
under this dauntless projector of the enterprise. With it 
he crossed the Allegheny and descended the Ohio in frail 
boats to Corn Island, near Louisville, where he erected 
block houses, drilled his men and planted corn. On the 
24th of June, 1778, while the sun was in eclipse, he went 
down the river, landed at the old Fort Massac, marched 
six days across the wilderness and appeared before Kas- 
kaskia, and took it on the 4th of July, 1778; and then 
pushed on and captured all the other British posts on the 
river. And thus by a blow, without serious loss, he planted 
the standard of American authority on the bank of the 
great Father of Waters. 



— 10 — 

The English Governor, Hamilton, at Detroit, was 
alarmed, and on December i6, 1778, retook Vincennes on 
the Wabash. Clarke accepted the issue thus tendered in 
brief words: " I must take Hamilton or he will take me." 

With about 170 ragged, but brave heroes, he, in mid- 
winter, crossed the country with scanty food supplies, 
waded rivers, and appeared with his unerring rifles before 
Vincennes, and on the 24th of February, 1779, captured 
the governor and garrison. In the meantime, by act of 
her Assembly, Virginia had organized the county of Illinois, 
embracing all the territory between the Ohio and Missis- 
sippi Rivers, which included this city of Marietta, (9 Hen., 
St. at Large, 552). A resolution was passed thanking Lieu- 
tenant Colonel George Rogers Clarke and his body of Vir- 
ginia militia for reducing " the British posts in the western 
part of this Commonwealth on the River Mississippi and 
its branches ; whereby great advantages may accrue to the 
common cause of America, as well as to this Common- 
wealth." 

This romantic chapter in the revolutionary war I pre- 
sent not only for its historic interest, but because it settled 
the question of our Western boundary ; and pushed it be- 
yond the Alleghenies to the Mississippi river. ' All glory 
to the Virginia militia and the military genius of their 
heroic leader, who, under direction of Virginia statesman- 
ship, broke the machinations of a diplomacy which would 
have made your anniversary impossible, and given up the 
valley of the Mississippi to a European power ! 

I am tempted to give you a letter written by this re- 
markable man to the Governor of Virginia from Kaskaskia 
on the 3d of February, 1779, when he had determined on 
this last adventurous enterprise. Its orthography is de- 
fective, but he made his mark ! in deeds, not words. 

After describing the attack on St. Vincent " by the 
famous Hair Buyer, General Henry Hamilton, Esq., Lieu- 
tenant Governor of Detroit," he says that he had " every 
peace of intelligence" he desired from a Spanish gentle- 



— II — 

man who had " escaped from Mr. Hamilton." And then, 
after stating the forces and the cannon and so forth, that 
Hamilton had, he quaintly adds, " has no suspition of a 
Visit from the americans — this was Mr. Hamilton's cir- 
cumstances when ]\Ir. Vigo left him." He says that hav- 
ing no expectation of any reinforcements, " I shall be 
obliged to give up the country to Mr, Hamilton without a 
turn of fortune in my favor; " and then adds, "I am re- 
solved to take advantage of his present situation and 
risque the whole in a single battle ! I shall set out in a 
few days with all the force I can raise," " amounting on 
the whole to only one hundred and seventy men," a part 
of whom were to go " on board a small galley, which is to 
take her station ten leagues below St. Vincent. If I am 
defeated, she is to join Colonel Rogers on the Missis- 
sippi." " I shall march across by land myself, with the 
rest of my boys ; the principal persons that follow me on 
this forlorn hope is Captains Jos. Bowman, John Will- 
iams, Edward Worthing, Richard McCarty and Francis 
Charlovielle, Lts. Richard Brashear, William Kellar, Abm. 
Chaplin, John Jerault and John Bayley, and several other 
brave subalterns. You must be sensible of the feeling 
that I have for those brave officers and soldiers that are 
determined to share my fate, let it be what it will. I 
know the case is desperate ; but, sir, we must either quit 
the country or attact Mr. Hamilton. No time is to be 
lost. If I was shoar of reinforcements I should not at- 
tempt it. Who knows what fortune will do for us ? Great 
things have been effected by a few men well conducted. 
Perhaps we may be fortunate. We have this consolation, 
that our cause is just, and that our country will be grate- 
ful, and not condemn our conduct in case we fall through ; 
if so, this country, as well as Kentucky, is lost." 

Can we wonder that, in the lexicon of that youth of 
twenty-six years — this Hannibal of the West, as John 
Randolph called him, — there was no such word as fail! 
And that because he did not, we are here to-day to cele- 



— 12 — 

brate the settlement, one hundred years ago, upon this 
soil, a part of that county of Illinois rescued forever from 
British control by the gallant men whom Clarke led to 
victory in 1779! 

But at that moment the organic Union was not yet 
formed. Some of the States insisted, and Maryland most 
obdurately, that all the States should make cessions of 
their territory to the Union. And there were many acts 
of an inimical character done by Congress and some of 
the States to the title and claim of Virginia. Some 
of these were based on the counter claims of States under 
purchase from the Indian nations, and some by certain 
corporations under like purchases. It would be useless 
to revive the memory or to discuss the merits of these 
claims. 

In September (6), 1780, Congress recommended to the 
several States to make liberal cessions to the United 
States of a portion of their claims for the common benefit 
of the Union. In response to this, the States made ces- 
sions ; and Virginia, on the 2d of January, 1781, did yield 
" all right, title and claim which the said Commonwealth 
had to the territory northwest of the river of Ohio," sub- 
ject to certain conditions. The State of Maryland, which 
had delayed until this was done to agree to the articles, 
now acceded to the articles of confederation, March i, 
1781, and thus the organic Union of the thirteen States 
was for the first time established. 

A long and angry conflict of opinion continued in Con- 
gress for several years as to the acceptance of the pro- 
posed cession of Virginia, in which a jealous doubt of her 
claim was manifested, but on which she stoutly and in- 
dignantly insisted. A reference to these is unnecessary. 

The ground of objection to her title seems, as I have 
already said, to have been judicially settled by the judg- 
ment in Johnson vs. Mcintosh (8th Wheaton) by a unani- 
mous court. Finally, on the 13th of September, 1783, a 
report was adopted in Congress to accept the cession of 



—13— 

Virginia upon six conditions named by lier in the original 
proposal of January 2, 1781, two of her conditions being 
declared to be unnecessary. 

Accordingly, Virginia, by an act passed December 20, 
^7^3) agreed to cede her territory upon the conditions in- 
dicated by Congress, and authorized her delegates to exe- 
cute a deed for the same to the United States. 

Finally, upon the ist of March, 1784, Virginia, by her 
delegates in Congress, tendered her deed of cession accord- 
ing to the said act of December 20, 1783. In opposition a 
petition of Colonel George Morgan, agent for New Jersey, 
and on behalf of the Indiana Company, was presented. 
A motion to refer it was lost, as also a motion to appoint 
a court to determine the respective rights of said com- 
pany and of Virginia. 

Congress then, by solemn vote, agreed to accept the 
deed, which was on the said ist of March, 1784, executed, 
delivered and filed, signed by Thomas Jefferson, Samuel 
Hardy, Arthur L,ee and James Monroe, the delegates of 
Virginia. 

The conditions imposed in this cession were that States 
(not less than 100, nor more than 150 miles square) should 
be formed out of the territory, which should be distinct 
republican States, "having the same rights of sovereignty, 
freedom and independence as the other States," and to be 
"admitted members of the Federal Union;" that the ex- 
penses of Virginia in subduing British posts and for the 
defense or in acquiring any part of said territory should 
be reimbursed by the United States ; that the citizens of 
Virginia in Kaskaskia, St. Vincent and other places be 
confirmed in their titles; that 150,000 acres be granted 
George Rogers Clarke and his men who marched with 
him to reduce Kaskaskia and St. Vincent ; that so much 
land be allowed between the Scioto and Miami Rivers 
for Virginia troops as shall be sufficient for the purpose, 
and that all other lands in the territory be " considered a 
common fund for the use and benefit of such of the United 



—14— 

States as have become or shall become members of the 
Confederation or Federal alliance of said States, Virginia 
inclusive, according to their respective proportions in the 
general charge and expenditure, and shall be faithfully and 
bona fide disposed of for that purpose, and for no other use 
or purpose whatsoever." ^ 

By the treaty of peace, 1783, Florida was ceded by Great 
Britain to Spain, and France having previously ceded 
Louisiana to Spain, the latter power owned both banks 
of the Mississippi at its mouth, and the free navigation of 
the Mississippi became a grave question for our infant 
diplomacy. If the occlusion of the Mississippi by Spain 
was submitted to, the Western country would have been 
shut in by the Allegheny range from the Atlantic sea- 
board, and from the sea by Spain, with the key to the 
Gulf in her hands. 

I remember when a young man, before the Allegheny 
mountains were tunneled for railways, that the difference 
between the price of flour at Baltimore and Wheeling was 
two dollars, and that as you descended the Ohio River the 
difference decreased. That is, the free navigation of the 
Mississippi, the outlet for the West, was its best hope to 
reach the markets of the world. What a hopeless condi- 
tion, had the door to the outer world been locked by an 
alien power ! 

I can say, with pride in the statesmen of Virginia, 
fortified by the generous tribute of Senator Hoar in his 
oration this morning, that they led persistently in the 
demand for a free Mississippi. Other States seemed at 
times to think their commercial interests might be ben- 
efited by shutting the Mississippi, and obtaining a monop- 
oly of Western trade through their territories to the 
Atlantic. But all such thoughts finally gave way to the 
resolutions of Congress, September 16, 1786, " that the free 
navigation of the River Mississippi is a clear and essen- 

1 A very full history of these matters may be found in Report 457 to the 
House of Representatives, the first session of the Twenty-eighth Congress. 



—15— 

tial right of the United States, and that the same ought 
to be considered and supported as such." 

Despite the cession of Louisiana to France by Spain in 
1801, American statesmanship triumphed in the assurance 
of free access to the markets of the world through that 
great estuary by the splendid acquisition of Louisiana 
under the administration of Mr. Jefferson. 

And so, from the day that the mountain heights of 
Monticello stood as sentinel guards over the cradled in- 
fancy of George Rogers Clarke and Thomas Jefferson, 
Providence had decreed that the one should conquer by 
prowess in arms, and the other by a wise diplomacy, the 
open water highway for the products of the West to the 
markets of the world. 

Nor is this all that I claim for the State which gave 
this territory, where, one hundred years ago, your 
Pilgrim fathers founded the seat of Northwestern civili- 
zation. 

In 1784 I find that Virginia, by an act of her Assembly, 
granted to James Rumsey, of Shepherdstown (now in 
West Virginia), the exclusive right to navigate her rivers 
by boats constructed to move up stream. James Rumsey 
built a boat which moved up stream by the power of steam 
before 1790. And the young feet of my venerable mother 
trod the deck of that wrecked and rude barge before the 
year of 1800. 

It is a matter of deep interest, further, to read the letters 
of George Washington and his cotemporaries in this de- 
cade a century ago, urging the water lines to the eastern 
base of our mountain ranges, and up the waters of the 
Potomac and the James; that thus they might approxi- 
mate the navigable waters on the western slope, and bring 
by waterways the products of the West to our Eastern 
ports. The idea was in their prophetic minds. Its reali- 
zation awaited the inventive genius of those who have made 
ironways a substitute for water, and who make the predic- 
tion true, that every valley shall b^ filled and every moun- 



— 16— 

tain be laid low, for the march of man to his highest 
destiny under the Providence and blessing of God. 

The title and security of the domain for American col- 
onization having been thus placed by the donation of Vir- 
ginia under the charge of the organic Union, formed by 
the Articles of Confederation, the materialistic view of the 
question may be dismissed. 

The question remaining for Congress was the settlement 
and government of the territory. As early as June 5, 
1783, and before the final acceptance by Congress of the 
deed from Virginia, Theoderick Bland, seconded by Alex- 
ander Hamilton, proposed an ordinance in Congress for 
the regulation of the territory ceded by Virginia ; it was 
referred to a committee, but was not acted on. On the 
day the deed was executed by Virginia, March i, 1784, Mr. 
Jefferson reported from a committee a plan for the govern- 
ment of all the Western Territory from the southern 
boundary of the United States at 31° latitude, to the Lake 
of the Woods. This ordinance, in Jefferson's handwriting, 
provided for a temporary government until the population 
increased to 20,000 inhabitants, when they might institute 
a permanent government with a member in Congress to 
debate, but not to vote. And when the population in- 
creased to that of the least populous State of the Union, 
then to be admitted into the Union. 

Five articles were added : 

First — The new States to remain forever as members of 
the Union. 

Second — To have the same relation to the Union as the 
original States. 

Third — To bear their proportion of burdens. 

Fourth — To have republican forms of government. 

Fifth — Slavery shall not exist in said Territories after 
1800. 

This did not abolish slavery, but forbade its existence 
prospectively, and had it been adopted would have forbid- 



—17— 

den it beyond a north and south line running along the 
the western boundaries of the then States of the Union. 

This fifth article was struck out of the report because 
not adopted by Congress, the vote being six States for it 
and three against it, one State not voting, and one divid- 
ed. The ordinance was then adopted, with the exception 
of that article, and continued in force for about three 
years. 

Meantime the movement for a Federal Convention, to 
revise the articles of confederation, resulted in its meet- 
ing in May, 1787, in Philadelphia. During the session 
of that Convention, Congress had under consideration the 
ordinance for the government of the Northwestern terri- 
tory. A company called the Ohio Company had been 
organized upon a plan projected in Massachusetts by a 
number of resolute men (many of whom had been heroes 
of the Revolution) as early as March, 1786. Rufus Put- 
nam, Winthrop Sargent, Manasseh Cutler, John Brooks, 
and Benj. Tupper were principals in the movement. In 
Ma'rch, 1787, a meeting of the subscribers was held in 
Boston, and Putnam, Cutler, and Samuel Holden Parsons 
were elected directors to apply to Congress for a purchase 
of land in the Northwest. 

It is of interest to state that Washington warmly sec- 
onded the movement of Putnam and others, who were his 
trusted associates in the army, and that La Fayette spoke 
of them and their plans with French enthusiasm. 

On the day. May 9, 1787, the ordinance for the North- 
west territory was ordered to its third reading, Parsons 
presented the memorial of the Ohio Company. It was 
referred to a committee composed of Edward Carrington, 
Virginia; Rufus King and Nathan Dane, Massachusetts; 
Madison, Virginia, and Benson, New York. Cutler arrived 
on July 5, and placed himself in immediate communica- 
tion with Carrington, chairman of the committee. A 
report was made on July 10, allowing the purchase by the 
company. 



The ordinance for the government of the Territory was 
referred to a new committee — Edward Carrington, of 
Virginia, as chairman, Nathan Dane and others. This 
ordinance in its new form, and without any clause as to 
slavery, was reported on the nth of July, 1787, and Con- 
gress proceeded to consider it. On its second reading^ 
Dane ( Mr. Bancroft thinks at the instance of Grayson, of 
Virginia, and others ) moved the clause forbidding slavery 
and providing for the surrender of fugitive slaves, which 
was adopted by the votes of Georgia, South Carolina, North 
Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey, New York and 
Massachusetts — all the States then present — Pennsyl- 
vania, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island and 
Maryland absent. There was but one member — Mr. Yates, 
of New York — who voted in the negative. Immediately 
thereafter the purchase by the Ohio Company was perfect- 
ed. Thus the ordinance to govern the Territory and the 
scheme for its colonization at this place were almost cotem- 
poraneous, and stood related as cause and result. 

Of that celebrated Ordinance of July 13, 1787, some 
observations are appropriate to this occasion. 

The ordinance may be summarized thus : 

1. Equality of heirship to a decedent between his chil- 
dren and kindred of both sexes. This was according, as 
well to Massachusetts law, as to that of Virginia in her 
legislation under the lead of Jefferson in 1776-7, but there 
was a saving to the citizens of Virginia in Illinois of their 
laws and customs relative to this matter. 

2. A government was provided of Governor, Secretary, 
and Judges, to be appointed by Congress, with power to 
adopt such laws of the original States as may be necessary 
and best suited to the circumstances, subject to the ap- 
proval of Congress. 

3. When there shall be five thousand free male inhab- 
itants, a Legislature is authorized. The Legislature is to 
be composed of Governor, Legislative Council, and As- 
sembly. 



—19— 

4- The legislative power is limited by the provisions 
and principles declared in the ordinance. 

5. As fundamental articles of compact between the 
original States and the people and States in said territory, 
unalterable but by common consent, six were ordained in 
substance as follows : 

First — Religious freedom, and civil rights not to be 
dependent on religious belief; a principle embodied in 
Jefferson's immortal act for religious freedom, passed in 
Virginia on the i6th of December, 1785 ; and engraven on 
his tomb, by his direction, as one of- his three titles to the 
remembrance of mankind. 

Second — Habeas corpus and jury trial, proportionate 
representation in the Legislature, and judicial procedure 
according to the common law ; deprivation of life, property 
or liberty only by the judgment of peers or law of the land ; 
just compensation to be allowed for private property taken 
for public use ; and no power by law to interfere with or 
aflfect private contracts. 

Third — As religion, morality and knowledge are neces- 
sary for good government and the happiness of mankind, 
schools shall be encouraged. Good faith to the Indians is 
enjoined, and legal protection to them and their rights. 

Fourth — The States formed from said Territory to 
remain forever a part of this Confederacy of the United 
States of America — to bear their proper share of public 
burdens — to lay no tax on the lands of the Union, nor 
interfere with the disposal of the soil of the United States, 
and the navigable rivers leading into the Mississippi and 
St. Lawrence to be common highways, forever free to all 
the people of all the States. 

Fifth — Three at least, at most five. States to be formed 
out of the Territory, as " soon as Virginia shall alter her 
act of cession and consent to the same " — and each of 
them to be admitted when it shall have sixty thousand 
free inhabitants, on an equal footing with the original 



— 20 — 

States in all respects whatever, provided its Constitution 
be republican and consistent with the ordinance. 

Sixth — "There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary 
servitude in the said territory otherwise than in the pun- 
ishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly 
convicted ; provided always^ that any person escaping into 
the same, from whom labor or service is lawfully claimed 
• in any one of the original States, such fugitive may be 
lawfully reclaimed and conveyed to the person claiming 
his or her labor or service as aforesaid." 

This ordinance, which for the validity of the fifth article 
was in its terms conditioned on the consent of the grantor, 
Virginia — and upon that of no other State — was a clear and 
complete recognition by Congress of the justice of the 
title of Virginia, and her supreme right to insist on the 
original conditions in her grant, unless she waived them. 

And the terms of this fifth article described the territory 
as to which Virginia's consent was asked, as extending 
from the Ohio to the northern boundary between the 
United States and Canada, thus embracing what is now 
Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan. And 
this was done by the votes of Massachusetts, New Jersey 
and New York, the only States who had ever contested the 
claim of Virginia previously. This is a virtual estoppel of 
all the States to a denial of Virginia's claim. Accordingly, 
Virginia, by her act passed December 30, 1788, declared 
her assent to and ratification and confirmation of "the 
said article" (being the fifth) "of compact between the 
original States and the people and States in the said terri- 
tory." 

I am free to say that in my judgment not only that act 
ratified and confirmed the fifth article as to the number of 
the States to be formed out of the territory, out by con- 
firming it as "an article of compact between the original 
States and the people and States in said territory" — of 
which compact Article Sixth, forbidding slavery, was apart 
— she must be deemed to have consented to the exclusion 



— 21 — 

of slavery from the territory slie had previously granted to 
the Union. 

She could have done it herself before her grant. And 
when her grantee did it with her privity and by her vote 
in Congress, and she consented to another article of a com- 
pact without dissent from this anti-slavery clause, she must 
be held to have assented to the latter, and is estopped to 
dissent thereafter. Nor was such exclusion contrary to 
her well-defined policy. She had, in her colonial history, 
protested against the slave trade, ar^, in the preamble to 
her constitution of June 29, 1776, written by Mr. Jefferson, 
had, in nervous and emphatic terms, arraigned George III 
for " prompting our negroes to rise in arms among us, those 
very negroes, whom by an inhuman use of his negative, he 
hath refused us permission to exclude by law." And in 
the following month (August 25, 1787), in the Federal con- 
vention, after her son George Mason had denounced it as 
" this infernal traffic," she voted to put an end to the slave 
trade in 1800, which was postponed to 1808 by the votes of 
the 'New England States (New Hampshire, Massachusetts 
and Connecticut), and Maryland, North and South Caro- 
lina and Georgia. 

And while she voted against the Jefferson clause in 1784, 
which forbade the extension of slavery into the territory 
south as well as north of the Ohio River, she was willing, 
from climatic as well as other reasons, to forbid its exten- 
sion into the territory north of that river. 

And now the domain for free colonization under law, and 
with the inspiration of religion and education, is* ready for 
the adventurous emigrants. The Old Dominion has 
granted it — the Union has accepted it — and the sturdy 
sons of Massachusetts, under Rufus Putnam, with her 
polity, civil and religious, braving the wilderness and the 
winter, land and plant their feet upon the spot where we 
stand to-day. Six States only on the 7tli of April, 1788, 
had ratified the new Federal Constitution proposed by the 
Federal Convention, September 17, 1787. You took pos- 



-22 — 



session under the Articles of Confederation ; you hold now 
under the Constitution of 1789. You pioneered the North- 
west, and others followed. The forty-eight immortals at 
Marietta a century ago are succeeded by fifteen millions of 
people from every section of the Union in the Territory 
covered by the Ordinance of 1787. The poverty of the 
unsheltered and hungry group of that day must be honored 
in the memories of that mighty mass of millions who now 
fill the land, they took into possession, with palaces and 
institutions of learning ; with churches of the ever-living 
God ; with teeming harvests of the earth and mines of 
inestimable wealth, and factories filled with the busy hum 
of manual industry ; and above all, with the intelligent 
love of liberty and law and religion under the Constitution 
of our fathers, to be consecrated by our devoted lives and 
defended to the death against all who would prostitute its 
sacred provisions to the purposes of private gain, to the 
behests ot ignoble factions or for the promotion of base 
and selfish ambition. 

For to you and to me, and to all within the broad limits 
of this great Union, the inheritors of the constitutional 
liberties of our fathers, come the solemn questions to-day : 
What will we do with it? Shall we waste or save our 
heritage ? Shall the motive influence of our life be the 
mere expansion of national power, and the accretion of 
national wealth ? and shall we pervert all we have inher- 
ited or acquired to an effeminate luxury, to a sordid 
ambition for riches or power, or to the destruction of our 
free institutions ? Let us rather take our inspirations from 
the hardy, simple, heroic and devoted men who, fearing 
God feared nothing else ; who erected here and everywhere 
in our land altars to the true God, founded schools for their 
children, established institutions of law and liberty, and 
consecrated homes of economy and industry, of a pure 
morality, of genuine and exalted piety. 

Our duty is plain, as our danger is great. Our danger is 
in one word, irreverence — irreverence to the simple vir- 



—23— 

tues and exalted honor of our fathers, irreverence to God, 
irreverence to the constitution ordained by them under the 
Divine guidance, and in the conservation of which we have 
become a mighty power on the earth. Our duty is vener- 
ation for all that is noble and great and pure, for God and 
His religion, for our fathers, who, in sincere and simple 
faith, feared nothing but to do wrong by disobedience to 
the Divine commands. And what we specially need, as 
citizens of this great Republic of republics, is to study 
with earnest diligence the principles of our free institu- 
tions ; to hold him an enemy of the country who derides 
fidelity to the Constitution, and trifles with his solemn 
obligation to uphold it ; who would use the power of the 
government to promote personal or party ends ; who stirs 
up the bitterness of buried strifes, and engenders sectional 
or class conflicts among the people of the Union; and 
who does not hold it to be his best and noblest civil duty 
to uphold and defend the Constitution in all its integrity 
against all the temptations to its violation by the corrupt- 
ing influences which surround us. 

The time has come, in this period when centennial anni- 
versaries summon us to look at the genesis of our being as 
a people, to examine and study the general principles in 
the development of which a century has passed, and to 
mark wherein we have departed from the law of our or- 
ganic life. That law is this : That a written constitution 
is the supreme law for government and for men, unchange- 
able by either, except in the mode it has ordained — supreme 
in the conscience of President, Governor, legislator, judge 
and citizen — not a constitution of growth and evolution 
from the exigencies of an advancing civilization, by the 
sophistries of ingenious men, or in obedience to their ca- 
price or corrupt desires or greedy avarice ; not a law one 
tiling to-day, another to-morrow; but, to apply a well 
known passage : Omnes genles et onini tempore^ una lex^ et 
sempiterna et impiutabilis. 

It is to this solemn duty I venture to call the sons of 



—24— 

New England and Virginia, and of all the States, here and 
elsewhere, now and always. Let the descendants of the 
sturdy men, who, here and elsewhere, laid this foundation 
stone — this elect, tried and precious corner stone for our 
free institutions, the absolute supremacy of a written con- 
stitution — bring us back to a higher and more healthful 
atmosphere of thought and feeling. Let us make this 
Union so strong under the faithful observance of the Con- 
stitution which made and conserves it as our greatest 
blessing ; so strong in the affections and devotion of the 
people that not only no: :^ shall be able to destroy it who 
would, but that none would do so even if they were able. 
Believe me, the bond of reverential love is stronger than 
that of force, and I think the South would say to-day that, 
though she could not dissolve the Union when she would, 
she now would not if she could. 

The decree has gone forth — THAT THE STATES CAN- 
NOT DESTROY THE UNION ! AND THE UnION MUST NOT 
DESTROY THE STATES ! 

I congratulate the people of Ohio, and especially the 
descendants of the Pilgrims, whose heroic fortitude planted 
this colony a century ago, on this auspicious anniversary. 
Let a review of the past purify and stimulate us to follow 
the noble example of our ancestors ; and, with hearty rev- 
erence for the God of our fathers, and veneration for the 
constitutional work of their hands, may we transmit 
the inheritance we have received to our posterity, so that, 
in the centuries to come, and to the remotest generations, 
this great Federal Constitution may be a light to the 
world, and secure the blessing^ ■ of a free and Christian 
civilization to this American Union of self-governed States 
forever. To such a union, under such a constitution, let 
us swear eternal fidelity, and pray, with united hearts, 
Esto perpetua ! 






LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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